PurposeLab: landing the experiment

Back in 2015 I launched PurposeLab, billing it as a one year experiment — the purpose of which was to help me find the work I found most purposeful. Well the time has now come to announce the closing of that experiment. The most obvious first learning to acknowledge is that one year wasn’t enough — it’s actually extended over 34 months.

I intended to use Theory U as a framework for my experiment and I set myself a loose bunch of rules and defined the values that I wanted to underpin the work. To close the experiment consciously and intentionally I’m going to review it and share what I learnt. This is probably going to be quite a long post — hopefully it’ll have some useful stuff in it for others, but its mostly for me.

The whole experiment sits under an overarching intention: to find the work that I find most purposeful. In review I can see that there are a number of sub experiments that emerged over time. I’m using the KaosPilots’ Learning Arches format to understand these.

Learning Arches format

Learning Arch 1: Changing the world through better business / corporate consultancy

At the start of the experiment I was still working on legacy NixonMcInnes projects — a substantial digital culture piece for Transport for London and a smaller innovation L&D piece for EDF Energy. These set me up well financially and also helped me frame how PurposeLab would operate. Just setting up invoicing processes helped me believe in myself as a business separate to NM. I did some branding work and created collateral, I set up a website and added case studies to it. But I was also working under some old assumptions — that my field of interest and expertise was business, that I could affect change in the world by helping corporate clients adopt new practices and processes.

There were a lot of positives about this work — particularly collaborating with Nina Timmers and Viktor Lysell Smålänning, which I benefited from hugely. But in the end it was dissatisfying. I realised that visiting my clients’ offices made me feel unhappy. That the stress and unhappiness felt within the organisations I was working with was causing me stress and unhappiness. That I would never choose to work directly within those organisations. And that crucially the work I was doing wasn’t having the kind of impact I wanted it to. The end of these projects — and the conscious realisation that this wasn’t the work I wanted to do felt like the real start of the experiment.

Meaning Conference sits within this Arch, as it’s a legacy of NixonMcInnes and speaks to the purpose of better business. After the managed wind down of NM, Meaning was the only asset left. It’s financial ownership sat with the shareholders of NM, which remained the holding company. But according to Tom Nixon’s interpretation of source theory the creative authority for Meaning lay with me, as I held the original vision for it. Meaning was a massive part of my first year outside of NM — for the first time I took responsibility for curating the content, selecting and booking the speakers that I wanted to bring to the community. I wanted to explore innovation as a theme, and bring in artists to share their creative process and practice. Working alongside Louise Ash was hugely enjoyable and getting to work with Jos de Blok of Buurtzorg, performance artist Marcus Coates and theatre-maker Annette Mees were highlights. But it was a massive amount of work for very little financial reward, that was made muddy and frustrating by what I grew to see as a false distinction between formal authority and creative authority. On the day itself I realised just how exposed I felt in standing before the participants and laying out my programme for the day — but I did it, and I did it as well as I could. I wrote it all up in a monster blog post and then started pondering what to do next.

Determining the longer term plan for Meaning offered different paths. I had become convinced that there needs to be alignment between the ownership structure of an organisation and its authentic purpose and values. In order to take Meaning into a new phase post-NM and give it a life of its own I felt we needed to explore how the community could become its owners. However, this compromised the existing structures and relationships in a way that was difficult to unpick and we became stuck. I decided that this was to the detriment of Meaning so I made the hard choice to step aside. But to do so turned out to be liberating and represented the final step in my journey to separate from NM and let go of the old purpose of changing the world through better business.

What I learnt

• Working for companies you don’t care about is a Bad Thing and leads to unhappiness. When unsure — use the ‘Do I Give A Shit’ test. If a job fails the test, get out.
• Money isn’t enough to make you care about companies
• Being able to choose new collaborators for each project leads to lots of fun and learning
• Acting as a consultant left me feeling divorced from the outcomes of the work — the work wasn’t mine to do, but my client’s so I was ultimately dependent on their ability or appetite to deliver it
• The busy-ness of business gets in the way of the work — and I’m more interested in the work than the business
• Ownership is authority — whoever owns something ultimately gets to choose what happens to it
• Ending things is a natural part of the cycle. Ending is not failure, but an opportunity for a new beginning.

the ‘Do I Give A Shit?’ test

Learning Arch 2: Cities as serendipity engines / placemaking through creativity

At the same time I was spending more time thinking about Brighton. I’ve lived in Brighton since 1990, moving on a whim after I graduated from art college and had nowhere else to be. I love the place. I had a hankering to spend more time thinking about Brighton and to work not just in it but on it.

I’ve been a trustee of the Pavilion Foundation for a number of years which has given me insider access to a building that some see as a heritage attraction, a museum, a backdrop for photos — but which for me is representative of the creativity that is embedded in Brighton’s DNA. Chris T-T once described the Pavilion as ‘the Googleplex’ of its day. This has stuck with me — there are so many examples of how innovative the design and construction of the palace is — from the spit powered by hot air in the kitchen to the cast iron framework of the domes. To build a party palace where he could express his true personality and be himself the Regent commissioned radical architects and engineers and convened the finest craftsmen. The place attracted those who didn’t fit in with convention — from Quakers to queers, Brighton is a place where The Other is celebrated and any crazy idea can be made real.

But what’s it’s future? What happens to creativity and individuality when house prices make the town unaffordable to the young, the artists, to those who live outside the mainstream? Who is telling a story of our future and how can I get involved? I got interested in how to explore this.

The Pavilion as a digital playground
Initially I wanted to explore how to engage the digital community and artists to play with the Pavilion as an asset — a backdrop, a place full of objects, of stories, of people with fascinating skills and knowledge. I wanted to set up a challenge with a funding prize that would lead to the development of digital artworks during the festival. I had enthusiastic and supportive meetings with the Festival, the University of Brighton and Wired Sussex. But I needed to find funding. I started a Grants for the Arts application but in the end ran out of steam — I couldn’t find a way of making enough money to support myself while I made it happen. I found myself overwhelmingly busy but totally skint.

I dropped the ‘Pavilion as digital playground’ idea (although I still love it) and did a bit of a review of what I was working on. I ended up plotting everything I was doing on a matrix with the two axes — is this work fulfilling? Is this work lucrative?

the Happy/Rich matrix

Luckily I had nothing in the bottom left but there was nothing top right either. I had to find a way to move work from my ‘hobby’ pot into the sweet spot, so I could ditch the ‘pirate’ pot.

What I learnt

• Artists are sense-makers and interpreters of the world around us. They use a process based on emergence and are comfortable starting something without knowing where they’ll end up. We can all learn from artists and I want to find ways to make this happen
• Funding for the arts is complex and institutions require a lot of input for even small amounts of assistance
• The arts is a new field for me where I have little experience and virtually no credibility but I was able to get access to ‘important’ people anyway just by starting with an attractive idea
• My network is kind, generous and forgiving of failure
• Killing projects leaves room for new possibilities to open up

At the same time I’d started a conversation with Austen Hunter about smart cities. He was working on smart parking solutions for the council which involved lots of conversations with technology providers, who were all hyping up ‘smartness’. But it was clear that smart didn’t necessarily start from the premise of making places better to live in — that it was more about the tech than about people. We started discussing hosting an event during the Brighton Digital Festival of 2015 to explore what a smart Brighton might look like.

Over time this event morphed to be less about technology and more about convening people to discuss what the Brighton of the future might look like and how we might get there. Austen set up a small amount of funding from the council to pay for a venue and also invited a fantastic speaker — Prof. Zef Hemel from Amsterdam. I designed the flow for the day and recruited some volunteers to help facilitate, to take photos and to document the conversation graphically. We started from the understanding that the day was a total experiment — we had no idea who would be interested in joining us or what they’d want to talk about so we hired a venue with capacity for 100 and designed a very open flexible structure. In the end 80 people signed up and 60 participated. We had a really energetic, energising conversation and I learnt a stack. It also had some unintended consequences — it helped make a statement of purpose for me personally and positioned me as someone who was thinking about the city and working to change it. This proved an excellent way of changing my field from business to urban communities.

Connecting Brighton (with images, tweets) · jennilloyd

Between starting the conversation and holding the event I was asked to host a panel discussion by Wired Sussex about placemaking and technology, opening my eyes to a whole new field of interest and research that fed into what came next. This wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t made it clear that I wanted to work on Brighton.

Underpinning my interest in cities was a concept that I’d been noodling for a long time — that serendipity is a key ingredient for innovation. I started thinking that places and spaces that convene people can be engines that make serendipity happen.

A city is the ultimate serendipity engine, containing multiple places in which people randomly collide. And Brighton feels like the perfect place to test how this can be consciously engineered, being big enough to have complexity but small and connected enough to see the impact of individual actions.

Where ecosystems overlap is where the greatest degree of diversity occurs and where adaptation happens at the fastest rate. I believe that one way of creating a better future is to harness collective intelligence in a better way by bringing people and ideas together in new formations and with new energy.

I recognised that I’ve been developing a pattern for events unconsciously for years — First Friday, Spring Forward and Meaning spring to mind — and that they share a set of common characteristics. I’m calling this pattern of events ‘Social Super Colliders’ and documenting how I think the collision of new people with new ideas to create change can be made to happen

What I learnt

• Decouple work from money — Start the projects you want to work on instead of working on whatever other people are willing to pay you for
• Serendipity isn’t the same as luck — it helps you put yourself in the right place for luck to happen
• The best work I do engineers the collision of diverse sets of people and ideas so that new ideas and networks can form
• Something always comes up

So that was Year 1 of the PurposeLab experiment. It was full-on, really exciting and energetic. I was once challenged by my ex-NM colleague Lasy Lawless to ‘step into my power’. I didn’t really understand what she meant at the time, but by the end of Year 1 I did know. I could feel it. I was pursuing my own ideas with nothing in my way.

Unfortunately, just before Christmas of that year I was knocked down by a car as I crossed the road. I was unhurt in any major way but it totally set me back in terms of confidence and energy and meant I started Year 2 in a very different frame of mind than expected. I lost momentum at a crucial point, feeling old, weak and vulnerable when I needed the power that I’d felt previously.

Rosie. Cute but crazy.

I managed to compound this unintentionally by bringing a puppy into the mix. The reality of living with a crazy little beast with sharp teeth was a total surprise, reminding me of the early days of parent-hood. I found myself unable to leave the house for any significant period of time and caught up in the puppy’s needs when I was at home. I gave up the tiny office space I’d been sharing with some of the ex-NM crew and retreated into myself at home.

After the success of Connecting Brighton I was trying to find a way of making it sustainable and impactful. I do believe that ‘conversation is smallest unit of change’ and so is important in and of itself but I was keen to find a way in which conversation could be turned into action. I teamed up with Fiona Ras at Brighton & Hove Social Enterprise Network (now The Platform) and along with Toby Buckle and Dave Boyle planned and hosted a series of follow-on events which we renamed CityLab Brighton. This wasn’t a particularly satisfying collaboration for me as ownership of the events became a bit confused and unclear and I felt I would have benefited from setting out the terms of the relationship more consciously. It was uncomfortable but some of what I was struggling with was about money. There wasn’t any. I started feeling very aware that when you work in an organisation and have a salary any voluntary (or self initiated) work is subsidised. When you are freelance there is an opportunity cost to all unpaid work, the time you spend doing that work is time you can’t spend doing or finding paid work. This was a long running tension throughout the whole PurposeLab experiment and not one I resolved, other than trying to manage the feelings I had about it and to recognise that paid work is often the result of connections and profile made doing unpaid work. But you have to keep the faith and believe that something will come. As an aside, I’m starting to wonder if this is why trustees and non-exec directors are often of a certain age and profile — and that organisations need to think about what they miss out on by not being willing or able to pay people to take on these positions.

The CityLab events were moderately successful from my point of view — they were well attended by people from a broad range of organisations, there were good conversations and new connections made. But I didn’t feel energised by them and was happy for the cycle of three to be completed and then not followed up.

What I learnt

• Look both ways when crossing the road
• A puppy is for life, not just for Christmas
• Set-up collaborations intentionally — use the adapted Blueprint of We

Bognor Regis Creative Digital Hub

It’s impossible to do this chronologically if I’m to continue with the Learning Arch construct so this jumps around a bit.

Early in 2016 Phil Jones of Wired Sussex invited me to join him at an event in Bognor Regis, at which West Sussex County Council and Wayne Hemingway would be launching a project to turn disused space at the local station into a hub for the creative digital sector. I didn’t realise but this was the start of a project that was to last nearly two years.

Wired Sussex has accumulated expertise in how hubs work through their experience running the Fusebox and partnering with Jon Markwell on The Skiff. They also have a deep understanding of the creative digital sector and what’s stimulated its growth in Brighton. This expertise made them an obvious partner for WSCC on their project in Bognor Regis.

I was brought on board to produce the project on Wired Sussex’s behalf. This turned out to be a fantastic opportunity for me to pull together my interests and develop my thinking in placemaking, in asset-based community development, in serendipity engines and in digital for all.

Initially we were charged with thinking through potential business models for the project. Working closely with Phil I spent a lot of time trying to understand what kind of place Bognor is, what is already there and what it needs. I talked to lots of people, did site visits and also explored precedents — other similar projects that we could learn from. This work was hugely satisfying and made more so by the opportunity to work closely with Matt Weston, who helped me develop my understanding of the field and to provide me with ongoing critique of the work.

A method for understanding the problem

This became a long term project and one that helped me reach the conclusion of my PurposeLab experiment. After the initial feasibility work was adopted into WSCC’s business plan we went on to explore the potential impact of the hub on the local skills agenda, thinking about how digital creatives tend to develop their skills over the course of their careers through both formal and informal community-based learning. We were very keen that the space be a home for a community, a central point at which people of all kinds could converge. This seemed more likely to help the sector grow organically, rather than a pure co-working / desk rental model. In order for this to happen we believed that the design of the space needed to conform to certain design patterns that would encourage and enable people to behave in a social, communal way. Matt introduced me to the book A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, a 1977 book on architecture, urban design, and community livability authored by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein of the Center for Environmental Structure of Berkeley, California. The core premise of the book is that:

people should design for themselves their own houses, streets and communities. This idea […] comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people.

This book became my bible in thinking about the form of the space itself and how its design would help influence the kind of behaviours that encourage and enable the users of the space to behave as a community — with all the benefits to the sector that could bring. All of our thinking was informed by the community of people the hub was designed to serve. We held many different types of events over the course of eighteen months, meeting people from across the (deliberately) broad range of creative digital business. My favourite was the first.

Answers to the question ‘what does Bognor need?’

We wanted to invite people to talk about Bognor Regis in a positive way and explore its future together. We didn’t want to get bogged down in small town politics and complaints about the current state of the town. So we invited the artist Maf’j Alvarez to bring her bean game to small pub on Bognor seafront on a wet and windy night. The RootBeans game is a mechanic that starts with the asking of a question and then encourages a group to explore the possible answers to that question in a fun, creative and chatty way. For me this was the ideal way of stating that our intention was to support a creative community, and to lay the foundation to make that happen. And it enabled me to consciously test the social super collider idea out in the wild.

We went on to run many other events over the course of eighteen months, but contractual negotiations over the lease, procurement rules and construction issues all delayed the launch of the hub. It will probably open in Summer 2018 but the delay meant that there was no real progress to engage the community in and the role Wired Sussex had been playing was no longer necessary.

What I learnt

• UX shares a human-centred design common ground with place-making and asset based community development — and so each can inform the other, and a UX designer can happily cross over into projects not based on interfaces
• Arts based practice helps find new ways of talking and listening to each other — and that’s crucial for participative design
• Stating my interest in place-based projects by running self-initiated projects lead to paid projects — and the formation of a new proposition for my work
• Projects with dependencies on legal contracting around leases and construction work exist on frustratingly elastic timetables
• Economic development teams in local authorities get to make big decisions that can lead to exciting developments for communities — they are good people to be friends with

Learning Arch 3: digital by all, for all

My background is in digital and I feel part of the digital community, even though it’s a long time since I designed or built anything. This foundation influences the way that I work and how I think about the future. Digital technology is becoming ubiquitous, underpinnning most of the key social and commercial transactions that govern our lives.

Change has always been a constant, obviously — but networked digital technology has accelerated the rate of change in a way that’s not yet generally understood. It concerns me that we are all participants in a culture that is being altered by technology that so few understand or have a hand in building.

There’s two main points that keep coming up for me — that the quality of the products, services, infrastructures being designed and built is limited by the lack of diversity in the minds that conceive and implement them; that technology is not neutral and instead is laced with the unconscious bias, attitudes and cultures of those who create it. If we hope for a better future we need to address the flaws of the past and not further embed them in the systems that govern our lives.

My first efforts to work on this problem were largely focused on the gender imbalance in technology teams. While at NixonMcInnes I’d started a Brighton chapter of 300 Seconds, running events that helped women in tech gain skills and confidence in public speaking. When one of these events overlapped with an edition of SheSays Brighton and Ladies that UX, also hosted at 68 Middle Street, the organisers got together and decided to run it as a festival. Named Spring Forward and lead by Viv Doctorovich the festival grew from those three events in 2014 to twelve in 2015, all designed to celebrate, support and connect the women working in Brighton’s digital cluster.

In 2016 I worked more closely with Viv to co-produce the festival, helping to grow the number and range of events, raise sponsorship and gain press coverage. Through the process I made a lot of new connections and was exposed to different experiences and ideas about the diversity problem. Viv and I decided it was time to hand over the Festival for 2017 so it is now run by Rifa Thorpe-Tracey of SheSays fame.

The Future of Work — and what this means for the education system
In the summer of 2016 Danny Hope rang me to ask if I could recommend a speaker for that year’s UXBrighton conference. We had a massively long and interesting conversation which ended with him inviting me to speak instead. I hadn’t done any speaking since Meaning the previous year and I was pretty nervous. I noodled about the topic in my back brain for a while, panicked and then stayed up all night the night before trying to gather my chaos of thoughts into a coherent talk. Apart from being twice as long as it should’ve been, it came out pretty well and helped me crystallise many of the things I’ve been thinking about in terms of the future of work — and how we need to be consciously designing the jobs of the future based on the kind of lives we want to enable.

Talk & slides from UX Brighton 2016

Off the back of this talk, and my experiences as a parent whose children have nearly come to the end of their education, I’ve been thinking about the education system and can’t help but conclude it’s a machine calibrated to make the wrong product. If the future of work is dictated by technological development and automation, so the problems inherent in tech are inseparable from the kind of future we’re building for all our social systems — work, education, leisure — life. I believe we need to redefine what we mean by work and reset some of the assumptions left behind by the industrial era. To enable more people to find fulfilling, meaningful work that they feel motivated to do. And in order to do this we need to radically shift the way education works to enable children to develop their creativity, curiosity and confidence so they can be more adaptable to the emerging work of the future.

The UXBrighton talk opened up this area of thinking for me and since then I’ve been invited to speak by the University of Sussex, the Institute of Development Studies and the Centre for Progressive Capitalism. On November 23rd I’ll be taking part in a panel discussion with MPs Ed Vaizey and Yvette Cooper at the Policy Network event ‘The world of work in transformation: A new deal on education and skills’. So thanks to Danny for starting me down this track and also to Phil Jones for inviting me to organise the Experience Day event as part of Wired Sussex’s Talent 2017, which gave me some good insight into the practicalities of the skills gap as seen by local digital businesses.

What I learned

• Random conversations about interesting topics with interesting people can become a platform for influence on topics I care about
• I’m energised by thinking about the connections between and within systems — and how purpose, flows and incentives affect systems. And I’ve got so much more to learn about how to understand and influence systems

Brighton Digital Festival

At the end of 2016 I saw a Facebook post by Vicki Hughes, promoting a voluntary position as Chair of the Brighton Digital Festival. I’ve been involved with the Festival in lots of different ways over the years and feel very attached to it. I starting punting out the link to the ad and telling people I knew that it was a great role. Then I realised that it could possibly be a great role for me if I could accept that it was another thing that would be high on the fulfilling axis, but low on the lucrative. It didn’t take long to get over that hurdle so I ended up applying, being interviewed and happily being awarded the job.

It turned into something that has completely shaped 2017 — bringing me new responsibilities, conundrums and learning opportunities, along with connections, ideas and insight.

Although the BDF has been in existence for many years it was only constituted as an independent CIC (community interest company) in 2015. When I took over the Chair I thought it was the perfect time to reflect on what its history meant — if the BDF was no longer a project belonging to other organisations, what was it? What could it be, what should it be — and how could it best benefit Brighton?

So we undertook a consultative process in which we asked a set of questions:

• What is Brighton Digital Festival for?
• Who is it for?
• Is it Brighton’s digital festival or a digital festival that takes place in Brighton?
• What good does it do?
• Who does/should it benefit?

The end result is a manifesto which we published in June. It’s a commitment, a statement of purpose, it’s both what we are and what we want to be and will help us to continue to develop in the right direction in the years to come.

The BDF Manifesto / 2017

Through the manifesto we’ve managed to develop the idea of the festival as a placemaking activity — one that puts digital culture at the heart of Brighton’s identity for the future, directly connecting to the radical creativity and technological innovation that produced the Royal Pavilion.

We’ve also made a commitment to creating social impact through the Festival — connecting together the diverse populations in the city, providing inspiration and engagement that helps build our creative talent pool for the future.

The Digital Festival provides us with a vehicle to draw together different communities within the city to develop a vision of the future we want to build for ourselves — one that is enhanced by technology and based on radical collective creativity.

We’ve got more to do but I’m proud of what we’ve achieved in the last year — clarity over our governance, a strengthened board, a clear statement of purpose, a refreshed visual identity and new website, a fantastic array of events and a new one day conference. Personally I have learned so much — not just about the nitty gritty of governance but about arts practice and funding. I’m also really grateful to the Festival Director Laurence Hill for introducing me to a whole array of thinkers and concepts — particularly Donna Haraway and Tabitha Rezaire.

In conclusion…

By the end of the summer it was clear to me that I was reaching the end of my experiment. I had discovered new fields, made some big decisions about what to pursue (and what not to pursue) and discovered some truths about what kind of working life leaves me most energised and fulfilled.

• I want to work on projects that have a direct, positive impact on people’s lives
• I want to work on projects that can influence decision makers in local and /or national government
• I want to be able to test new ideas that take us into a more collaborative, participative future
• I want to do this as part of an organisation, rather than on my own. I miss being part of a team, of something bigger than myself

So this epic post is both the closing of the PurposeLab experiment and the start of something new. I’m writing this on a train into London, commuting to my new job at Nesta, the innovation foundation. I’m managing a fund called ShareLab, which is testing ideas for how digital platforms can support the collaborative economy by funding pilot projects. Nesta is full of teams working on the big topics for the future and one of the most compelling things about my new role is the access it gives me to interesting-ness. It also fits in with my understanding of innovation — the testing of hypotheses through pilots. I’m really looking forward to understanding how it all works in practice and how I can make the most of the opportunities afforded by being part of such a credible, well-funded organisation.

I’m proud of the work that I’ve done as part of the PurposeLab experiment, excited by all the new things I’ve learnt and boundlessly grateful for all the people who’ve helped me.

Onwards!